Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. The author of four books, his new study of the Ken Curtis administration is due next year. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

I paddle up Cobbossee Stream with the Labrador alongside. It’s a crystalline September day, neither warm nor cool, the water still, the sky pale and cloudless, the sun just about where the full moon had been a night before.

Along the shore, an osprey breaks cover, in full flight before the eye can focus. On the water, two flocks of Canada geese cruise and call to each other, waiting, waiting, then taking off in a chorus of honking.

Road sounds have faded and the air becomes soundless, expectant, inviting a halt and a shoreline survey. Cottages and camps are closing up, another season passed. 

A chance conversation with a fisherman headed downstream has me thinking. Up to now I’ve ignored chattering about the next presidential race, already underway for money, polls and endless electronic “messaging.”

What am I looking for in a candidate, things that won’t change between now and then? There are three points I’d like to hear more about.

The first is a universal service program for young Americans, toward the end of high school and college or the first job. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 partly because he promised one.

What we got instead was AmeriCorps, enrolling 1.25 million since 1993, conceived as a domestic counterpart to the Peace Corps, which has had 240,000 volunteers since President Kennedy started it in 1961.

Both are worthy programs that have changed lives, but neither comes close to re-creating the common experience at least male Americans had for two centuries through the military. Army and Navy service was a great leveler of class, wealth, education and eventually race until the draft was ended by Richard Nixon in 1973, replaced by professional, all-volunteer forces.

The question is whether we can replace the sense of national purpose once created amid war and turn it to peaceful ends. So far, the answer is no; we seem far more aware of our rights as Americans than any responsibilities citizenship might entail.

One year of universal service wouldn’t cure our ills, but could go a long way at the beginning of adult lives to repopulate the public square and encourage us to consider what we can build in common.

The second point, related to the first, is a school subject called “government,” sometimes “civics.” Distinct from history, it attempts to orient students toward understanding basic systems underlying our public life, and about which polls say we’re woefully ignorant.

Completely apart from partisan, geographical and individual distinctions, civics, if well taught, can have a transformative effect on how we view those we elect to represent us. It would include state and local government, mandatory before anyone comes of voting age.

I’d go further and extend study to adults and seniors. Past decades have left far too many cynical about elections and, worse, about fellow citizens who inevitably hold different views. Senior colleges, civic organization and yes, even political parties working side-by-side could do a bang-up job of getting us collectively to stop and think.

Finally, my ideal candidate would create a National Election Commission on day one. The commission would hold public hearings and genuine listening sessions in all regions to find out what would truly restore trust.

“Election security” is not getting the job done. While national and state elections are more closely vetted and litigated over than ever before, distrust  keeps growing, and the “other side” is constantly under suspicion.

Such a conversation would be welcome in Maine. Democrats have rallied around ranked-choice voting as if it were the solution for “wrong” election outcomes. Republicans, as in the pending Question 1, believe in tighter election controls, including presentation of ID cards and curtailments of pandemic-era access.

A real dialogue might shed doubt on both positions. Ranked-choice is, after all, just another way of counting votes already cast, and doesn’t obviously benefit one party or another. Voter ID could be made to work fairly, but is it top priority when it’s impossible to show more than a handful of Maine voters casting ballots outside the law?

Discussion could lead to things almost everyone agrees on, such as the inordinate cost of campaigns, even though a constitutional amendment would be necessary to reverse benighted Supreme Court decisions.

If national service, civics education and electoral consensus already existed, we’d have understood what it meant when one candidate refused to accept results of an election he lost and worked to overturn the results. The peaceful transfer of power is the bedrock of democracy, without which even our votes have no meaning.

It’s still possible to return to our true path.